Nieves Saah

Nieves Saah, raised in Bilbao, a town in the Basque region of Spain, is a painter who almost exclusively uses palette knives and spatulas to scrape and layer paint on her pieces. Saah earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she graduated summa cum laude.

Saah feels that her rich color palette reflects her not only her life in Spain, a country with a vast, colorful art history, but also her extensive travels in South America, other parts of Europe, and the Middle East. Her paintings are complex and usually composed of contrasting colors. She creates images by stacking colors next to each other then taking away what she feels is unnecessary and moving “the paint to where whimsy and a lifetime of skill dictates.” Saah’s paintings are emotional and often express stories of her own life. She will not stop working on a painting until she believes it is complete. Often, she will set a work aside for long periods of time before she can truly bring it to fruition.

Saah’s work has been shown extensively in group and solo shows in the United States and Europe, including at the Sideshow Gallery in New York City, the Decker Gallery in Baltimore, and the Galleria Dix in Helsinki, Finland. She also has work in collections at the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and in private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. Saah received the Gertrude Pentland Merit Scholarship and was the selected candidate by NYFA and the Spanish Cultural Council in New York for Artepreneur. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, the Star Ledger, and the WashingtonPost, among others.